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Puck is a weekly webcomic that, in the words of one fan, is "mostly irreverent humor concerning a pretty girl with freckles and a hot she-devil who wears fan-service costumes." Surreal fantasy slice-of-life crazy-type stuff about the world's funniest redhead! Updates Tuesday.

Puck 423

NEW VOTING INCENTIVE!!! WINTER SKETCHES!!!
January will be devoted to some winter activity sketches to get us in the seasonal mood! It’s easy for me right now because it’s currently -20 C outside with over a foot of snow. Vote to see this week’s offering! (And remember: fans who donate $5 or more a month get a say in what voting incentives run! If you want to join their controlling ranks, HEAD ON OVER TO PATREON and join the select club!)

This ends the chapter. And represents the last entry of ‘phase three’ for this webcomic. (In other words, if I ever get around to printing Volume Two of Puck, this will be the final strip in that collection.) The fact that it ended right at the very end of 2017 is honestly pure coincidence. But it’s nice when things align like that.

I wish everyone a good new year, and hope 2018 is not a disaster. 2016 and 2017 haven’t given me much to be hopeful for on the global front, but hope springs eternal.

Just saw The Last Jedi (Baldie smuggled me in under his coat so he save on a Ticket).

The Film-Makers have really learned their lessons.

WAIT – NO SPOILERS

Kylo Ren has evolved into the mold of Darth Vader (Kylo will never be DV, but is halfway there now). He is now a respectable villain instead of a pubescent whiney boy.

The Porgs are cute as a button, and hilarious. And lacking any of the cloying cuteness those awful Ewoks were dripping with.

No Jar Jar in the movie – (sigh of relief).

And keep your eyes peeled for some Golden Dice. Other fans tell me they belonged to Han Solo (Kylo Ren’s father), and hung on the Millennium Falcon’s Rear-View Mirror like Fuzzy Dice. They are the dice used when Han won the Falcon from Lando Calrissian.

Even so, Baldie tells me Han had his first encounter with Fuzzy Dice (fuzzy skulls), way back in 1973, in AMERICAN GRAFFITI, when both he and director George Lucas had their first major movie success.

Off Topic: What is really cool is our local AMC Theatre now has RESERVED SEATING. You buy your Tickets online, and CHOOSE YOUR SEATS. Baldie bought them a week in advance and got the best seats in the house. He was happy, indeed.

I was ‘meh’ on the most recent movie. I felt it was a good amount of really cool concepts and scenes wrapped up in a bunch of really sloppy narrative. Everything concerning Rey and Luke and Kylo I was good with and I thought worked. (Interestingly, that’s the stuff most of the vocal ‘angry internet guy’ critics have a problem with, but I liked it.) My problem is everything else. It was messy, or unnecessary, or didn’t entirely make sense, or just wasted proper beats that could have made it far more satisfying.

I do like the reserve seating thing, though. I make use of that myself with the local Imax theater. I dislike waiting for over an hour before a movie to get non-crummy seats.

Those space battles in The Last Jedi were stupid enough to ruin immersion for me. Sadly the movie was still better than the prequels. Also, Salem is the first one I’ve seen praising porgs. Most people seem to hate them especially after they were marketed so heavily before the movie came out. Master Yogurt must be rolling in his merchandising money.

I was waiting for that to happen when one of them was stomping on the lightsaber and so disappointed when it didn’t. Then I hoped they’d be like the Dodo from American Dad that constantly tries to kill itself only to be casually saved by people. Sadly, Disney wouldn’t even make them a running gag. The one moment with a porg I liked was the one shouting along with Chewie. Chewie’s frustration with the porgs was well set up making that moment fairly funny.

“The Force Awakens” was ruined for me once I realised IT IS EXACTLY THE SAME PLOT AS EP Four! Rogue One was okay. Darker, but okay. We are going to see TLJ this weekend (we have been planning to for some little while, but things kept happening) and all the spoilers I have been obsessively reading (I hate suspense) had better be right.

Darn, I was looking forward to Oberon and Titania coming to the wedding. Well, they are not exactly family, I guess, but “connections,” as the Brits say. Surely, EG, you won’t turn down the chance to draw Titania? And Oberon. He’s my fave. *Puppy Dog Eyes*

Nope. No more fairy creatures. Or any other fantasy elements. This isn’t really a conscious policy, really, but I’m making it a conscious policy right now: NO MORE MAGIC BEINGS OR NON-HUMANS ALLOWED. I just realize that I’ve carefully avoided the introduction of any such beings after the first few comics, and I think it’s for the best. Probably.

Awww… But one could show up, turn Colins head into a donkey, make puck have to ask politely to get it back, then disappear again, never to be heard from again, other than a few references… No?
I just think it would make an amusing short arc that shows some characters differently. Or now that I think about it, do it to Daphne when she steals from them.
But if you’re sure about that rule…

i know why i steadfastly refuse to watch those prequels….anyway, now that this chapter is over, i´m guessing the next will be the wedding madness? i mean come on, between phoebe wanting to be a bridesmaid wearing pink glitter and colin family making a reappearance, there´s no way this wedding will just happen nice and quietly!

As for the comic, it’s weird to see Puck (or really, anyone) having a fully white speech bubble (in this case, Puck in panel 3). I’m so used to it having at least SOME color in the bottom, it threw me off when reading it.

I’d sooner Yoda train an Army of Porgs, all dressed in Minion Overalls, armed wid cute widdle Lite-Daggers, commandeered by Jar-Jar Binks (who now identifies as a female, in a dress with an enormous curly blonde wig), and the entire film re-invented as a Musical with score written by Rankin/Bass (a la 1977 HOBBIT than see that moron DARTH MAUL on screen again.

Wait ! The Puck gang is still in Hamilton ?! And here I thought the lack of Winter Scenes was due to them moving out to warm places in B.C – like Prince Rupert, Comox, Victoria or Vancouver….

The last thing I though of was laziness on the writer’s part… (My own style of laziness would just have speech bubbles and say that the gang is in the middle of one of those famous East Coast Pea-Soup fog banks…)

I used to map out exactly the month and time relative to the comic’s passing time. So for instance, in and around the ‘Satan for Mayor’ comic arc, things looked decidedly fall-ish. In fact, there’s a fall comic and a Halloween comic, and we seem to extend into November (election season no less), and after Satan is elected mayor, he looks out on a snow-covered landscape. A few comics later, there’s a time jump, and it’s spring. It works. Then it stops working.

Miranda is about one year old now, if we can guess from development. That means the comic should be about one year from her point of birth, which seemed earlier to be during the spring. Fine. But that means that the previous comic arc should be early spring/late winter, but Puck opens the door in comic #359 and the grass is green. Mind you, that was a dream, so … maybe it actually WAS the winter in real life? The comic arc before that was the amusement park story arc, though, and Miranda looks around 5-7 months old there, and that makes NO sense. If she were born in the spring, they were visiting the amusement park in the fall. But things looked mighty green.

That said, I reserve the right to make the comic become winter again whenever I feel like it. (Honestly, the real reason is that story arcs in a weekly comic carry us throughout the calendar year in real time, and no one seems to care when a comic features green grass in the dead of winter, but people get weirded out when a comic features a snowy landscape in July.)

Does Colin have… two right arms? It looks like his hand on Puck’s head, but his arm’s tucked into the blanket. And it wouldn’t make sense for her hand to be there unless her elbow were up. Did someone throw a spare hand in there to make it weird? (It is a hospital and we know the cast.)

Curses! I thought no one would notice that. But YOU DID. Honestly, the only answer is for me to get rid of the hand, because the framing doesn’t work for his arm to really get there. So I cheated. Then I forgot about the cheat and drew the arm at the side of his body. Then I inked it and colored it and it was too late, but I thought it would slip by.

The great Bill Mauldin of WW2’s “Up Front” drew the extra hand at least once – Willie and Joe are holding each other up, each has a hand on the other’s shoulder, their other hands holding bottles, and their other other hand gesturing at a sergeant “Honest, we’re just a couple of red-blooded American boys”. Funny stuff for the time. Mauldin wrote that he didn’t notice the mistake until after publication, which meant paper. It would be funny to see future art critics explain how, like the extra leg on an Assyrian lion, the extra limb (whether Willie’s or Colin’s) is a powerful artistic statement.

You see, Robin’s Relatives (tiny fairies) live in all natural decorations, and although they enjoy Christmas as much as anyone, they do become bored of it all (not me, tho), and become quite angry if they are forced to remain inside after the Twelfth Night.

Hmph, all our decorations were gone after Christmas Day. My bf is very particular about things like that. And I don’t buck him (about THAT!) because I am out of the Christmas spirit on the afternoon of December 25th. About the time I make him clean up all the discarded wrapping paper. When he gets back into the house, he says, “Down with the tree!” and I join in.

My wife’s like that too: once Christmas is over, she wants the decorations and tree gone. I don’t care, really, though a bunch of the houses in my neighborhood still have their Christmas lights on, and I’m not cool with that. They’re not winter lights; they’re Christmas lights.

Already nagging/pestering my bf about what he is going to give me for St. Valentine’s. He just looks mysterious and says “You’ll see.” So, I guess a trip to Hawai’i is out. I’d have to start shopping now. Cruise wear is in all the stores. 🙁

They have lots of coconut crabs there. You would like it. Watching the kitty mascot at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel chase them is worth the price of admission. Well, for me, it’s free, since I’m not paying for the room or the Modified American Plan.